How do you filter out bad ideas for your game before they hurt it?

By revolving on gut feelings, you lean towards a "bring-everything-in" attitude and waste time on bad ideas you'll regret down the line. You need a more grounded and practical methodology like the Game Pillars Filter Buckets Method. It gives you a new way of reasoning about your Game Direction and makes you face every decision with a thinking process that makes you own your choices.

This week, I'll show you how to boost any incoming game design idea by concretely leveraging your Game Direction like never before. To fully apply this method, Game Pillars are required, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the answer.

The Filter Buckets Method doesn't tell you what's best for your game but makes you discover it.

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To effectively use the Filter Buckets Method, you need to understand:

• What’s The Filter Buckets Method
• How To Filter Your Game Design Ideas
• Don’t Forget To Think

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What’s The Filter Buckets Method

The Filter Buckets Method is a decision-making tool.

First of all, this tool is based on a widely used prioritization tool in software management and project planning. You might already know it; it’s called the MoSCoW Prioritization Method.

If you don’t, no worries since you don’t need it to understand the Filter Buckets Method. I’ve re-engineered it to work in a simple process involving Game Pillars. This way, you have a concrete and practical way to actually follow your Game Direction.

But why is this useful to you?

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The Filter Buckets Method takes Game Pillars to the next level.

The purpose of this tool is to filter new incoming ideas based on Game Pillars. Of course, to make it effective, you need both well-made Game Pillars and an established Thematic Structure.

Despite not being critical for this tool, Thematic Structure coherence should be the first check whether to consider an idea or not. Ideas that go against your Message are mostly not good because, if not adjusted, they create internal incoherence. Then, the Filter Buckets Method (FBM) aligns the idea with your Game Pillars.

So, the FBM is a Pre-Production tool that will boost your decision-making.

Let’s now look at how you can use it in practice.

How To Filter Your Game Design Ideas

First, you need to check how your idea aligns with Game Pillars.

The FBM consists of 4 buckets: Must, Should, Could, and Won’t. Within these buckets, you should put all the feature ideas you want to include in the game (not only gameplay ones, but whatever you can think of).

So, pick an idea and check how it aligns with each of your Game Pillars.

To do it, you need to assign to the idea one of these 3 characteristics:

• Aligned: The feature respects the Pillar, meaning the Pillar achieves a greater impact on the Target Game Experience.
• Neutral: The feature is indifferent to the Pillar, meaning the impact the Pillar has on the Target Game Experience doesn’t change significantly.
• Against: The feature goes against the Pillar, meaning the impact the Pillar has on the Target Game Experience decreases.

You have to check this for each individual Game Pillar.

Now, you can already get a sense of whether your idea is on the right or not.

But now it’s time to make a decision.

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Second, put your idea in a bucket based on the alignment.

Once you have your idea with a bunch of alignment characteristics, you need to choose what to do with it. Here is where the 4 buckets come into play.

So, check which bucket your idea falls into:

• Must: The feature Aligns with all Game Pillars. Mandatory features you want in your game.
• Should: The feature Aligns with most Game Pillars (>50%), but it’s Neutral to some. Excellent additions to the game, but not necessary.
• Could: The feature Aligns with some Game Pillars, but it’s Neutral to most (>50%). Not a significant addition to the game, but decent one if you have time and budget.
• Won’t: The feature is either Against one or more Game Pillars or it’s Neutral to all. Might be good functionality-wise, but not Target Game Experience-wise (maybe next game).

The peace of mind you get by filtering ideas like this is astonishing.

By reasoning this way, you can’t help but focus on your Game Direction. And this solves for good the problem of all the Game Directions that teams often build once and then leave to take dust in a corner.

However, that’ snot over yet because you can do more.

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Third, re-evaluate your ideas buckets through time.

Once you have your idea in a bucket, that’s not the end. You could (and should!) use the FBM to improve your ideas.

In this context, improving an idea means increasing its alignment with your Game Pillars. By knowing which Pillar your idea is not aligned to, you can precisely understand what element of it you should act upon. Your goal is to align your idea with as many Game Pillars as possible.

So, for example, you could find a way to align a “Could” feature with a few more Pillars and move up a level to the “Should” bucket.

So, the FBM is a powerful tool, but pay attention to always keeping yourself in control.

Don’t Forget To Think

The Filter Buckets Method won’t ever replace your brain.

This method will be a great help during Pre-Production by smoothing out many problems in your decision-making process. Yet, don’t use it as a substitute for reasoning.

The FBM allows you to make more informed and conscious decisions, but it will never make them for you. Like any Game Design tool I’ll give you, this is NOT a prescriptive tool, but a descriptive one. This means I’ll never tell you what it’s best to do for you. Instead, I’ll give you specific tools so you can analyze your situation in detail and make smarter decisions on your own.

And that’s what the Filter Buckets Method is all about.

Also, let me finish with a last crucial caution note.

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The Filter Buckets Method is only a Game Pillars check.

Make sure to use tools considering their purpose, and don’t overextend their usage. The complete name is “Game Pillars Filter Buckets Method” for a reason.

It’s only an initial check, and it doesn’t guarantee that the idea is a good one game design-wise. So, going through the Game Design Iteration Cycle is always necessary to properly define the feature details. Let’s say that you want to add the Triple Jump, and by passing it through the FBM, it turns out that it’s a Must-feature. However, adding it makes you re-design all the levels because the level design is based on a Double Jump.

So, despite being a Must-feature, it’s probably not a good idea unless you can pay the burden of remaking all the levels. As you can see, you can’t delete the brain’s effort to reason and choose what to do.

The Filter Buckets Method helps you spot and think about the deepest ideas for your game.

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Key Takeaways:

• The Filter Buckets Method is a decision-making tool that takes Game Pillars to the next level.
• Put your idea in a bucket based on the Game Pillars alignment and then improve it.
• The Filter Buckets Method is a descriptive tool that doesn’t replace your brain.